Digital Humanities @ CSU Receives Mellon-Funded DEFCon Grant

The Digital Humanities at California State University (DH@CSU) Consortium has received a Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium (DEFCon) award, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to build institutional capacity at the intersection of Digital Humanities and Ethnic Studies.

The DH@CSU Consortium was formed by faculty across the CSU who have research and teaching interests in Digital Humanities, with the goal of fostering a system-wide collaboration of resources and expertise. It currently has members from eight of the twenty-three CSU campuses — including three EML faculty: Dr. Armondo Collins, Dr. Kate Ozment, and Dr. Kristin Prins.

In October 2022, DH@CSU Consortium members in the San Diego State University Library’s Digital Humanities Center and San José State University King Library's Digital Humanities Center hosted Networked Connections: Explorations Across Digital Humanities, which was part of the CUNY Digital Humanities Research Institute.

The DEFCon award represents the next step forward for DH@CSU members. With the commencement of the Ethnic Studies requirement in the General Education program, the DH@CSU Consortium is focusing on building a purposeful collaboration between Digital Humanities and Ethnic Studies. The Consortium is hopeful that Ethnic Studies’s embracing of community engagement and focus on underrepresented voices can be augmented and enhanced by the methodologies and approaches of Digital Humanities. The DEFCon award is an opportunity to explore this intersection, as it will allow the Consortium to expand membership by identifying additional Ethnic Studies faculty with interest in the Digital Humanities and create a network to connect them across disparate campuses.

As part of the grant’s activities, DH@CSU Consortium members will develop strategies for sharing infrastructure and resources, such as a virtual software lab, and will be able to access mentorship networks through the Digital Ethnic Futures Lab as part of Dartmouth’s Digital Humanities and Social Engagement Cluster. With the DEFCon award and additional mentorship, the DH@CSU Consortium will explore how to support resource-intensive Digital Humanities research projects and cultivate innovative teaching methods to imagine new approaches, courses, and programs in the CSU system.

Logo created by Duyen Nguyen and the SJSU H&A Marketing & Communications Team